Dead Girls
Beth Kubrick
Simon & Schuster
September 2026
Dead Girls by Beth Kubrick is a horror graphic novel in the same vein as the “Scream” type of movies.
“I love horror stories and I love flashes and I love those films. I started watching them around 2010-ish. I just really like comedy horrors especially. I just think it’s cool. And then the kind of downside to them, I guess, is they always have a teen girl as the protagonist. But I don’t think she’s written as a real teen girl. I think she’s written as the platonic ideal of a teen girl: the girl who was designed to be tortured and terrified and she survives at the end. I wanted to write a little bit less of a perfect final girl. I got the idea for this story from the slasher genre such as “Halloween,” “Scream” and “Friday the 13th,” with the classic tropes. There’s a big guy with a knife and he’s going to get us and it’s all about politics, but it’s a horror film and it’s fun.”
Kubrick is both the writer and illustrator. “I have quite a poor visual imagination. I remember being a kid and desperately wanting an imaginary friend because I thought it was so cool that other people had imaginary friends. I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t live in the fantasy. My mom referred to my little baby doll as my baby when I was three years old and I was like, ‘mom, it’s a doll. Calm down.’ She loves telling that story. So, then I would draw to see it, and felt now I get it. I think I like writing better in the sense I like coming up with ideas. I like coming up with stories. I’m always coming up with them. I have like note pages and notebooks filled with it. I just think there’s something so much fun about a quick doodle. My favorite art is always just black ink, 3 lines on paper that somehow tells a story. I draw one picture and that represents things. I want to write words. I want to write dialogue. I want my characters to be saying funny things. But I draw for clarity.”
Ashley is the daughter of Evelyn Hargreeves, one of the youngest female serial killers on record. After five girls in small-town Clossdale are killed, local detective Helen quickly suspects that Ashley (Ash) may be a copycat who’s following in her mother’s footsteps. Ashley is weird, guarded, funny, and tired of being an outcast.
“I wrote her as a terrible girl, but has so much affection and love. I think she’s messy, and she’s kind of me and she’s my friends and she’s, I think she’s a lot of people. I think she’s being told who she is and what to do, and she’s angry about it. I think she’s unpopular, an outcast. I think the town is telling her she is that. So, she has become that. But I also think that the thing that’s sort of unique about her is, even if she was born into the most loving, stable, comfortable family, I still think she’d be a little prickly. Her main sort of pain, her main hurt is this badness that has been assigned to her. And she is sort of overcoming that. And sort of accepting that, embracing it, also negating it. I think that does all tie into sort of that legacy and that history of her family.”
Ash is also tired of hearing about young women murdered with nobody seemingly doing anything to stop it. After receiving a note warning that she is next, she decides to take matters into her own hands. With the help of her foster sister, Cassie, and her best friend, Jamie, Ash sets out to prove her innocence and make sure no one else is murdered including any of the trio.
“They are helping her to trust and confront the past. Literally in the book, she’s like, ‘no one loves me,’ and they’re like, ‘We love you. We are right here.’ They’re showing her there’s another way. You can be a different way. You’re a whole person and we love you. They are going back to the final girl’s route, the final girl who gets to survive, she always survives because she’s not like other girls. The girls killed all engaged in the teenage activities that the naughty girls are doing, the ones that deserve to die. Obviously, Cassie is hyperfeminine, she’s Super-girly. I think she genuinely is like a bit ditsy but she’s intelligent and she’s helpful and she’s great. And then Jamie is a lot more laid back and has a totally different vibe to Ash. They think of themselves as individuals, but all are working together and all friends and this is lovely and wonderful. I think they all have very different traits and vibes to them, but that kind of makes them work together as of a trio instead of one of them trying to do it alone.”
Anyone who enjoys horror films and stories will enjoy this graphic novel. There are missing girls, the creepy woods, a mistrustful small town, and the masked killer energy. Yet, Kubrick puts her own imprint on these slasher stories with a snappier and humorous story.
